Oh my, it’s wet and grey!

Oh my it’s wet and grey in the Kispiox this morning! So much for my plan to start a massive digging project in the garden, which we walked away from weeks ago, intending to be right back. I am capable of working in the rain, but if there’s a choice, I’ll wait until the weather clears a little. When my daughter Kesia and I moved here in July, we knew that we were taking a chance on the garden. I had carefully researched our growing zone and it seemed that we would be in a microclimate of zone 5a to 5b but in fact, there was no sure way to know when our first frost would arrive and how much of a killer it would turn out to be. Answer: September 26 in the year 2016. Who knows what next year will bring? Ain’t nothing predictable anymore and that’s half the lesson of this kind of homesteading enterprise.

Garden newbies with some experience and a fairly comprehensive library of books full of organic and cold-weather techniques, that’s us. When we got here, I was city-soft, overweight, in pain in several of my joints and (all my own fault) I had lost most of the lovely upper-body strength I was blessed with as a young woman.  What I could do, I discovered, was work the broad fork. This is a primitive, square, hefty row of tines with two long wooden handles. You poke the tines in the earth, stand on the bar and rock back and forth til the 7 or 8 inch tines are buried, and then step back and pull on the handles.   Miraculously, after a couple of weeks of that, my shoulders were in better shape than they’ve been in several years.

Still, it was Kesia who got down and dirty, digging out the couch grass with a garden fork and prying out the large rocks that showed up here and there. Our soil is alluvial. We are two hundred yards from the Kispiox River, and clearly this whole valley was glaciated at one time. I would love someone to do a geophysical survey of the yard, so I could see where the gravel is, where the clay and where the deposits of beautiful rich soil such as we found in our garden area. Several people offered to rototill our plot, originated by past owners and tenants. We graciously (I hope) declined, knowing in our heart of hearts that we’d be better off digging out the damn grass than if we allowed someone to chop it into tiny, Hydraesque fragments. We’ll never be free of it; and indeed, more pressing matters like containing the horses and training the new puppy and keeping ourselves fed precluded doing more than clearing five or six garden beds (not double dug as we first hoped) and leaving grass paths, so this fall, this morning in fact, I am determined to start broad forking and then digging out the grass paths between the beds.   My plan is to spread some partially composted horse manure on the garden beds as they are, and then as I dig out the paths, I will pile the dirt, worked free of grass and weeds, on top of the beds.   Then I will spread the compost we have managed to acquire over the summer, mixed with barley straw and more horse manure, on top.   After that I will mulch the beds with old hay. I think.

Craaazy! But I am going to rely on my little herd of chickens to take care of the grubs, slugs and weed seeds as they pop up in the early spring.   My chickens are hardy northern breeds, some Barred Rocks, some Cocomarans (how I like to spell it because it sounds so jaunty and so are they). The range free, far and wide, in the daytime, and returning to their secure and roomy coop, which they share with the two Alpine/Nubian goat sisters, at night and during rest periods when we let their natural predators, the dogs, out to run and wrestle. The chickens run rather than walk. Occasionally they flap their strong wings and sail a few feet in any direction. They scratch and vigorously turn over the deep litter in their coop, finding all sorts of things to eat in there, including grains that ferment in the warm, microbial paradise that occurs naturally with a foot to eighteen inches of wood shavings and the poop and pee of 14 healthy chickens and 2 healthy goats. The pen gets lots of ventilation, to the point that during wind storms I have to go out with my staple gun and fasten tarps over areas of the open wire so the animals can relax. The rest of the time they seem to enjoy the view from the pen, relatively safe from the swooping ravens and owls and the burrowing foxes and martens. I give them fresh water every day. So far, they have all but scorned the special chicken watering device and prefer to scoop their drinks from an open bucket, which soon gets full of shavings and goat poop. Did I mention goats are indiscriminate poopers? Chickens mostly poop at night, when they are on their roosts, which makes their droppings easy to deal with. Whoosh! Use a piece of board to sweep them onto the dirt floor and sprinkle fresh shavings every few days.

In our case, the roosts are birch branches tucked into the lattice of the coop walls and screwed down. If you don’t have fairly level perches for everybody they will spend half the night jockeying for position, trying to be the highest in the surrogate tree.   There’s a plywood table under the roosts, and two lovely sheltered kennels under the plywood. The goats tuck in there, and sometimes one is used as a nest box. It’s also a refuge for new or injured chickens. Yes, accidents do happen, mostly accident by dog who can’t resist pouncing and pulling out tail feathers. Our new regime of alternating freedoms seems to have alleviated that problem for now.

So you can see that we are encouraging the cycle of life here on the land. We are incorporating the chickens as tiny living rototillers and tractors. We are feeding them the choicest stuff we can find, a mix of vegetable and fruit scraps, organic commercial feed, garden waste which they are allowed to forage for themselves, and for extra protein, any presents the cats bring in from their daily rounds of the barnyard and closer fields. I always turn away when I fling a dead shrew or vole to my favourite hen, not really caring to see every detail of egg pre-production.

Speaking of eggs, six hens are giving us about 7 eggs a week. This varies wildly and rather than find a timer and introduce artificial light into the coop, I’ve bought six young pullets so that as egg production slows in the winter, we are likely to still have enough to make an egg breakfast every couple of days.   I have been buying organic free range eggs for as long as they have come available in Vancouver, where we lived for almost 30 years before coming here just over four months ago.   I would buy “farm eggs” at any opportunity and on visits to my sister and neices’ farms in Pemberton I would often be gifted beautiful fresh eggs.

Still. These are incredibly delicious. Have you ever eaten eggs still warm from the hen? It’s not remotely necessary to take it to that extreme, and it would be a bit macabre to stand there and wait, but on occasion I have found an egg at body temperature and, blessing the beautiful hen who laid it, have cracked it open and cooked it with home made toast and bacon from the next town.

So! In the spring, we will begin our pig adventure.   We are arranging with the man outside of Telkwa, near Smithers, to breed one of his Tamworth gilts for us. I am showing off right now. A gilt is a young sow in her first pregnancy. Tamworth is an old English breed of pig, reddish and bristly, that produces lovely lean meat and fabulous tasty fat. Our favourite meat right now is “Roman bacon” made from the jowls, and it is more fat than meat. But the fat is very fine, healthy and flavourful and beautiful for cooking other foods.

We are busy reconstituting that barn that some of you have heard about, so the horses can shelter when they want to out in one of the fields, and a bay in the present barn can be freed up for Mrs. Pig and her babies.   We answered an ad in the local paper to tear down a small barn in return for the wood. Eventually, we came home with most of the wood plus salvaged wooden forms for a 500 square foot greenhouse and a yearling stud colt we have named Falcon. Ten days from now, we will host an old fashioned barn raising and housewarming party, with a potluck lunch and a beer and chili bonfire when it gets dark. If we get enough helpers, and it looks like we will, the newly wrought barn will shelter us for the party. Weather permitting.   That old caveat, although our neighbours in the Kispiox Valley are a hardy bunch and we are becoming so rapidly.

The greenhouse frame in question is visible from the bay window beside my “office” (a table 30” square with room for my computer, a notebook and the cellphone that powers the computer when I want to send things or look up a word.) The frame consists of seven struts fashioned out of 2×4’s and 1×4’s, and it’s 12 feet wide, 10 feet high at the peak and 46 feet long. We should be able to get up to some serious homesteading mischief in there.

We just experienced another howling Kispiox windstorm and that thing did not budge, although most of our other possessions were tumbling around the yard all night and half the morning. When the wind blows from the east, we know to draw a big pot of water and stoke up the wood stove for tea because the power will surely go out. Never for long, because the Hydro workers around here are magicians who never sleep, but there is a big, shiny red generator in the tool shed portion of the triplex animal coop/woodshed should a power outage become inconveniently long. The generator is wired into the electrical panel in the cabin so it looks like we’ll always have access to a quick cup of tea, one way or the other.

It remains to be seen how the greenhouse will behave once it has its uv-resistant plastic skin, about to be donated to us by one of the forestry nurseries in the area. Apparently they have a “part-roll” kicking around that they are willing to give us. Bless you, Joe, Mr. Nurseryman. As always, we are naively diving into our project with the end in sight: a winter palace for the chickens, who will have access to the yard and garden in good weather and shelter from the storms when they need it. The deep litter method is brilliant for this because the composting action emits a little heat, and so do the bodies of the chickens, while their breath sends out a little extra CO2 for the plants. It will be a place to start vermicomposting and to set out early seedlings which will be asked to sprout in the basement of the cabin on the workbench under grow lights this winter. I think it’ll be a good place to install a passive solar heated shower come summer, and to grow the best damn tomatoes west of Bruce Hill’s yard in Terrace. Eventually, we want it to be a place to help ensure food security in our area, as well as for the farm.

People around here have yet to roll their eyes at us when we go looking for advice, materials, or concrete help when we confide our latest schemes, whether to haul a little horse 90 km or meet a young chicken breeder in a church parking lot, or plant a couple hundred cedar seedlings along the interface between our hayfields and the 20 year old “forest” that has grown up since the most recent clear-cut of this precious valley.   The mountains around are full of cedar and fir as well as hemlock and pine and spruce, but here on the five hundred acres of weeds and bush behind our little farm, there are lovely stands of birch, aspen and cottonwood and some conifers are growing back, but the cedar has been all but wiped out. In the interests of future building projects, I think it would be nice if my kids and their companions could have access to some cedar if they’re as partial to it as I am.

I see that it’s still raining. Time for a cup a tea and a leisurely phonecall to one of you out there on the lower coast. I’m sorry to hear that the feds have not yet chosen to announce a tanker ban, and we haven’t heard any details about tougher regulations for any kind of shipping in the inner passage, most especially in the face of the damn preventable diesel spill in Heiltsuk territorial waters, and then the sinking of the gravel barge off Klemtu. I’m sorry that the damn US election has consumed so much people energy, and at this writing we don’t know which way it will go. I’m glad, though, that it is still possible to decide to be happy for even a few minutes a day without turning a blind eye to injustices and exploitative practices happening around us.

Many blessings! Until next time.